We'll

just sing that a few times, and then we'll move into the next part.

We're created to love, she said, and everything is intertwined with everything else, and love means solidarity with the Gwich'in people, with the Caribou, with the whole community of life.

So if I am called to love, and that really is what being human is, and it takes a lot of discernment to do that, choices, careful walking through each day, I need to love this place because everything is interdependent and connected to everything else.

Everything is intertwined with every element, everything.

I mean, the breath that I'm breathing as I'm sitting here in this Arctic place is breath that has touched ancestors, people, creatures for millions, billions of years.

The water that we're drinking out of this river here from glaciers is water that some probably dropped sometime, touched Jesus.

Everything is so intertwined.

Interesting.

We know that's not true.

One of the things that we've seen through hundreds of years is that congregations have practiced interim leadership for all of this time because they figured out this is the best way for a smooth transition, is to put some space between the departing leader, the pastor, the rabbi, the priest, and the incoming, to give everyone a time to settle and have a vision for where you're going.

So it's not a new idea.

We're just a little slow in accepting it for our nonprofits as a best practice.

Um, Joan, it seems to me that there's some logistics with this, and I'd love to know, uh, with your illustrious career and the placements that you've seen, does this conversation start with, like, an HR communi- uh, committee or executive committee, or is it opened up to everybody? Or, like, what, what's the organic, maybe it's not, organic is not the right word, but what's the structured process whereby these decisions get put forward? Or does it go to the full board immediately and then it gets hashed out there?

It depends, um, on the organization and how they're structured and how active.

Very often when an organization comes to us for an interim executive director or interim CEO position, it's the board chair or the executive committee that have sort of been tasked with figuring out how the organization's going to handle this leadership transition.

That's a broad word.

It is a broad word, but we think it applies to interim leadership in that from the very first conversation that an interim has with an organization, there needs to be intention.

We're going to do some specific things on purpose during this transition time.

We're going to come to some agreements about what will be important during this transition.

We might change our mind halfway through, but we're going to start out on an intentional path, um, and really come to an agreement that an interim is not there to just protect the status quo.

Yeah.

How do you do that in the short term? That's what the method is about.

It's taking everything they know and they've practiced and they're experts at, and saying, "We're gonna hone that down so you can show all of those skills and e-"Expertise session in this short period of time.